Take care of your donors! (Norton's Facebook page)

Today, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced legislation with Rep. Ken Calvert, Republican of California, to establish a memorial to the Fair Housing movement somewhere on federal land in the District. "The memorial speaks to the progress we have made in fair housing, but also reminds us of the distance we still have to travel," she said in a press release. "It is particularly gratifying that the idea for this memorial came from the Fair Housing Commemorative Foundation, a foundation of the industry that is subject to the laws achieved by the fair housing movement.”

It's not a new project. The same proposal came up in 2009. But the Fair Housing Commemorative Foundation doesn't appear to exist yet; at least Guidestar doesn't show it as a registered nonprofit. The "industry" Norton speaks of is the National Association of Realtors, which has agreed to fund 100 percent of the memorial's construction. The real estate sector has also been incredibly generous to Norton and Calvert's reelection campaigns, donating $315,951 and $559,776 respectively since 1989—the top-donating industry for both of them. The National Association of Realtors specifically has donated $37,700 to Norton and $93,250 to Calvert.

This, after Norton said at Saturday's town hall with the National Park Service that she wanted "to make sure the Mall isn't littered with too many statues of every Tom, Dick, and Harry."

So she'll presumably be finding an off-Mall spot for the Fair Housing Memorial (certainly worthy of memorializing!). I just hope she and Calvert have told their donors that.

All of this is bad news for the folks who make their living on the premise of homeownership as the ultimate goal of prosperity: Real estate agents. And they're not letting the bedrock principle go lightly. At their annual conference in New Orleans a couple weeks ago, the National Association of Realtors rolled out a gauzy infomercial:

It's an emotional pitch ("Homeownership matters because it's a true reflection of who you are!"), and maybe that's what NAR is going for. But it doesn't answer any of the serious questions raised about the value of real estate as an investment that will always pay off, or make any case for homeownership as an element of more sustainable communities, as the Region Forward people suggested this morning. It would be great to see NAR throw in its lot with progressive housing policies, rather than just blithely cheerleading real estate acquisitiveness using all the old arguments that drowned out warnings that a hot market wasn't all it seemed. Perhaps too much to expect of a trade association, but one can always hope.

Evan Johnson and Tom Bauer, the Gay Agents. (Darrow Montgomery)

Evan Johnson, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker, has two business cards. One, a conventional rectangle, simply says “Evan Johnson Realty Group.” The other is fancier, with two curved corners. It reads: “Evan Johnson, Realtor,” with “MyGayAgent.com” on the back.

The ambiguous slogan on the sexually neutral card—“Bold Company, Straightforward Real Estate”—might say more about Johnson’s business than the blunter one. Other realtors advertise in the Washington Blade (one slogan: “The Realtor for our community!”) but Johnson is the only one who’s so up front about his competitive advantage.

It’s fairly common for real estate agents to specialize in a geographic area. What Johnson’s done—focusing on a specific demographic—is a little less routine. He had been a general contractor in Northern Virginia, but he started MyGayAgent.com in 1999. Soon after, he met a banker named Tom Bauer, who joined the business when the two married in 2004. Their targeted marketing helped the team weather the economic downturn by attracting a niche audience—even in the slow, slow years of 2008 and 2009, Johnson closed a respectable total of 36 deals and did $10.1 million in sales, with a clientele that’s about 80 percent gay.

Despite their distinctive branding, though, at the 17th Street NW Coldwell Banker mothership, Johnson and Bauer don’t stand out. It’s an open and airy office, with people constantly circulating and glass walls that make everybody feel like part of everyone else’s business. And about half the agents based here are gay, including the branch vice president, Kevin McDuffie. Wearing a burnt orange plaid shirt and jeans, McDuffie stopped in to say hello on Saturday before heading out to spruce up his front yard for the 17th Street Festival, where the office would have a booth giving out multi-colored dog treats.

The high gay-to-straight ratio of Coldwell Banker’s Dupont Circle office is a legacy of a time when Dupont was a rainbow oasis, anchored by institutions like gay bookstore Lambda Rising, which folded last year. The housing boom of the last decade, though, put an end to that—incoming gay people can’t necessarily afford to live in the neighborhood anymore. At the same time, widening social acceptability has made it easier for gay people to spread wherever in the city they like.

“I think there’s a stereotype that gays want to live in Dupont, because that’s where the bars are, but that just isn’t the case,” says Bauer, who lives with Johnson near 10th Street NW and Massachusetts Avenue. “I don’t think gay people feel the need to cluster and alienate themselves anymore.”

And so, following a familiar pattern, gays have forged outwards into Shaw, Columbia Heights, 16th Street Heights, and into the H Street NE corridor, to the point where it’s difficult to identify any one as a “gayborhood.”

“Our community has been known historically for going into marginal neighborhoods and helping to fix them up, taking properties that are undervalued and helping to bring back neighborhoods,” says Rick Rosendall, a gay activist who has lived on or near 17th Street NW since 1984. “Now the heyday has passed, and the center of activity has moved a little bit east, and scattered. It’s no longer quite the hub of activity that it was.”

—

If the District no longer really has predominantly gay neighborhoods, and if gay agents are fairly common in the business these days, what makes marketing efforts like MyGayAgent.com useful?

The District, after all, is probably the most gay-friendly jurisdiction in the country. Gays and lesbians account for 8.1 percent of the population—the highest density of any state (probably because no states are comprised of just one city). While the national Fair Housing Act doesn’t prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the National Association of Realtors is still working GLBT protections into its ethics code, the D.C. Human Rights Act has outlawed such discrimination since 1977, and the D.C. Office of Human Rights recorded only one sexual orientation-related complaint on a housing issue in 2009. (Though that doesn’t mean it’s a thing of the past—the Equal Rights Center still has cases in D.C., mostly in rental housing).

Some straight real estate agents will even get training on how to behave around diverse populations. The National Association of Realtors offers a course in serving international buyers, which requires a familiarity with different customs around housing (feng shui, for example). There’s a similar class for gay and lesbian sensitivity, which can just mean not looking at clients strangely when they use GLBT-specific vocabulary.

“We find a lot of people want to use a gay real estate agent because whether it’s a couple or not, they can say oh, ‘a his and his closet, or a her and hers closet,’” says Johnson, who last Friday afternoon wore a blinding white polo embroidered with the MyGayAgent.com logo.

Still, fear of discrimination by straight people still persists in the gay community. You probably won’t find anyone advertising MyBlackAgent.com or MyJewishAgent.com—outright racism and anti-Semitism are harder to find in the real estate business than homophobia. Johnson and Bauer, by selling their gay-friendly credentials, offer a guaranteed comfort level for buyers. (And when they list houses, nobody has to know the seller is gay—they can just use the EvanJohnson.com label.)

“As a gay couple, there can be a very real fear of rejection,” says Richard Vitale, 26, who met Johnson at the 2007 Gay Pride parade and called him up when he and his partner started looking for a house. “There’s always this moment when you wonder, am I going to get discriminated against? When you work with Evan, that’s immediately off the table.” Priced out of Dupont, Vitale found a spacious condo in Takoma, where they found a thriving lesbian scene.

For those moving out of the area, Johnson maintains a list of known gay-friendly real estate agents all over the country.

“If you just choose an agent, by just throwing a dart, you don’t know the person you’re getting is going to be open to your lifestyle,” says Bauer, noting that some of their clients have already had uncomfortable experiences with straight realtors. “They weren’t feeling the warm fuzzies, because they felt like they were getting judged.”

If gay buyers are nervous about prejudice in tolerant D.C., they may have real cause for concern in Virginia, which is among the worst in the nation when it comes to gay rights. Straight realtor Valerie Blake, who has cultivated a large gay clientele by advertising in the Blade (she started 11 years ago with the double-entendre tagline, “Experience your first time in 1999!”), remembers one open house in Virginia where she was told that the owners didn’t want to sell to a gay person.

“I thought, they can’t do that, it’s illegal!” she says. “And then I thought, well they can do that, we’re in Virginia.”

Bauer and Johnson do market themselves as knowing the local points of interest for gay people—and according to Vitale, they have a sense of the “gay aesthetic,” which he characterizes as “a little avant garde, something a little out of the ordinary.” But they have to take care not to steer anyone to a particular neighborhood just because they’re gay, in order to abide by fair housing laws themselves. In a statement to Housing Complex, the national Fair Housing Alliance said it “strongly discourages using any class or category that is protected by federal or state laws in any form of advertising.”

“Let’s say a lesbian couple were to read that language and say the word ‘gay’ applies to men,” explains Dan Sullivan, the alliance’s senior enforcement program director. “If they could demonstrate that that’s what the language meant to them, then they might actually have a claim, because they could allege that that’s sex discrimination.”

Still, it’s unlikely that any fair housing organization would go after Johnson and Bauer for their out-and-proud marketing strategy. If anything, they’re threatened by competition: A D.C.-based lesbian real estate couple started gayrealtors.us.com about a year ago, but declined to talk about it. Johnson and Bauer have already squelched people who more brazenly copied their concept.

It’s a business, after all. “At the end of the day, it’s marketing,” says Bauer. “You search gay agent online, and we come up.”   CP

Visit the Housing Complex blog every day at washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/housingcomplex. Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com. Or call (202) 332-2100, x 224.

The credit—as we've reported about extensively—was extended earlier this month. The ten percent jump is higher than analysts expected, but with hoards of buyers rushing to close in October (and probably November too), there may be a steep drop in sales in coming months.

After all, the pressure's off again.

The next deadine for the extended credit is April 30. Here's NAR's chief economist Lawrence Yun on the subject:

“Many buyers have been rushing to beat the deadline for the first-time buyer tax credit that was scheduled to expire at the end of this month, and similarly robust sales may be occurring in November,” he said. “With such a sale spike, a measurable decline should be anticipated in December and early next year before another surge in spring and early summer.”

2008 Third Quarter: 333.0

2008 Fourth Quarter: 295.1

2009 First Quarter: 279.4

2009, Second Quarter: 319.2

2009 Third Quarter: 324.7

The National Association of Realtors has posted a Q&A about the credit, which is altered significantly in this bill, on its website. Their responses should answer all the basic questions:

Who Qualifies for the Extended Credit?

• First-time home buyers who purchase homes between November 6, 2009 and April 30, 2010.
• Current home owners purchasing a home between November 6, 2009 and April 30, 2010, who have used the home being sold or vacated as a principal residence for five consecutive years within the last eight.

To qualify as a “first-time home buyer” the purchaser or his/her spouse may not have owned a residence during the three years prior to the purchase. If you or your client purchased a home between January 1, 2009 and the date the bill is signed by President Obama, please see: 2009 First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit.

Which Properties Are Eligible?

The Extended Home Buyer Tax Credit may be applied to primary residences, including: single-family homes, condos, townhomes, and co-ops.

How Much Is Available?

The maximum allowable credit for first-time home buyers is $8,000. The maximum allowable credit for current homeowners is $6,500.

How is a Buyer's Credit Amount Determined?

Each home buyer’s tax credit is determined by tow additional factors:The price of the home and the buyer's income. Under the Extended Home Buyer Tax Credit, credit may only be awarded on homes purchased for $800,000 or less. Under the Extended Home Buyer Tax Credit, which is effective on November 6, 2009, single buyers with incomes up to $125,000 and married couples with incomes up to $225,000—may receive the maximum tax credit. These income limits have changed from the 2009 First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit limits. If you or your client purchased a home between January 1, 2009 and November 5, 2009, please see 2009 First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit.

If the Buyer(s)’ Income Exceeds These Limits, Can He/She Still Get a Credit?

Yes, some buyers may still be eligible for the credit. The credit decreases for buyers who earn between $125,000 and $145,000 for single buyers and between $225,000 and $245,000 for home buyers filing jointly. The amount of the tax credit decreases as his/her income approaches the maximum limit. Home buyers earning more than the maximum qualifying income—over $145,000 for singles and over $245,000 for couples are not eligible for the credit.

Can a Buyer Still Qualify If He/She Closes After April 30, 2010?

Under the Extended Home Buyer Tax Credit, as long as a written binding contract to purchase is in effect on April 30, 2010, the purchaser will have until July 1, 2010 to close.